Debbie Currie

With the January 2013 grand opening of the NCSU Libraries' James B. Hunt Jr. (Hunt) Library, our lives and those of our users were changed forever. Like Howard Carter peering into King Tut’s tomb, visitors entering Hunt Library for the first time see “wonderful things” – expansive MicroTiles walls, robots that retrieve books, and high-tech visualization, creativity, and gaming spaces.

So where do subject specialists fit into this high-tech picture? Learning how the new high-tech spaces can be used and how to recognize when faculty may have a project that would be well-suited to those spaces is a given. The greater challenge, however, is finding a way to trigger that Aha! moment when they see a potential connection between their work and these new spaces. The aim is to get them intrigued by the prospect of integrating these spaces into their teaching and research by showing them relevant examples that will leave them thinking ‘I can do that’.

My approach to achieving this has been to collaborate with an assortment of early adopters and willing guinea pigs to create visual exhibits that will demonstrate how these highly visual spaces can be used to:

Add value to research

Promote university programs

Enhance teaching

This presentation will provide a brief introduction to the technologies and spaces in question, followed by examples of visualizations that were created in collaboration with campus personnel. Among the collaborations to be highlighted are:

Data visualizations based on current soil science research

Visualizations to promote sustainability initiatives in agroecology and university dining

Horticulture and crop science faculty using visual spaces for teaching and presentations

The end result, we hope? That one day those “wonderful things” library visitors see will include dynamic visual representations of sustainability activities on campus and the cutting-edge agricultural research taking place at our university.